journalist, author, and editor based in New York City, who grew up in Sweden and New York.

I have mixed feelings about my addiction to the illusion that I can make heads, tails, or demon horns out of the endlessly traumatizing news cycle. I try, and I am heartened by the feedback that many of you feel kind of safe and comfortable here, even if we are not equipped to BREAK BIG STORIES IN REAL TIME. thump thump.

Associate Editor Jack Mackerel

I want to go home, go back, go somewhere.

I want to not be hooked into all this terrifying narrative, with which I also traumatize others, (you guys) in the sacred name of getting-to-the-bottom of-the-bottomless-abyss. Funnily enough, this never seems to happen.

I have a proper book-book to complete right now. I have to “un-hook.” I ask, warmly encourage, you all to keep looking, posting, even fighting, if need be. Tell me (us) what you know, suspect, find. My trolls love you too, they just don’t know it yet.

Women make good journalists in the sense that nobody takes us seriously anyway so what do we have to lose when we get beaten like gongs. It just has a kind of clarifying effect, in the end.

I just saw a headline that the latest shooter, in Texas, was an Antifa member. He looks quite indistinguishable from a KKK type. All these creeps start to look the same–just post-human. Those clammy, dead eyes. Jesus, what has been done to these people? Have they never picked blueberries in the woods? (In Sweden, my mother actually steered us toward a very rejected–by the Swedes I mean–cousin berry to the blueberry, an oblong, not perfectly round berry called an “odon.” She had us all–cats included–in the woods, filling buckets, certain we had struck gold. Nobody else was interested in them. They actually tasted kind of weird. But we made jam, juice…)

These are the things I prefer to think about, when my nerves start to shake–unravel. I do not (not anymore) have the nerves necessary to do “investigative journalism.”

I unhook the hooks, and admit a kind of defeat. I do not know. I can never know. I don’t know if that photo that person, that name, that narrative is entirely real, entirely fake, or some composite of the two.

So to heck with it all. What am I saying? I want my “life” back. I am only really on solid ground when I tell little stories that I know are true, because I saw and heard them with my own eyes and ears. Subjective perception.

True success, to me, is when you say you can tell what I am asserting vs. what I am thinking out loud about. Transparency. Thank you. (In this instance, thank you Scott Gordon. But thank you to each person who has ever expressed “getting” the elusive concept of this website that doesn’t behave much like a news site or like a conspiracy site.)

It is a trauma portal. Edited by somebody who has survived many rounds of trauma based mind control, since I was shorter than my desk. Because it happens in families, as it happens in society at large: Rage based reality shaping.

This is all I know: Those who hold forth narratives based on what they observe, as H.C. Andersen’s child did, are met with abuse, rage, and identity collapse. So: Any time you see that–anger, rage, attempts to make somebody feel like dirt–truth is trying to cross over.

5 thoughts on “Watching Ourselves, Loving Being Small In A Big World Of Monsters Who Can’t See Us”

Celia, your courage and perseverance in the face of adversity is admirable. Of course, it isn’t just female journalists who aren’t taken seriously. Some of the most brilliant and hard-working female lawyers I know have never — NEVER — been promoted. Neither have I — even when I did five times as much work as everyone else. Why? Because women with integrity who are not ass-kissing, back-stabbing, lying, cheating assholes do not get promoted. Back in the early 80s when I was a software developer I got yelled at one day by my male boss because I solved an APL programming problem far more elegantly than he did. A male programmer would have been praised for that, but because I was female I was verbally abused. Yet women like us persist. We’re still here, and there is nothing men can do to make us go away.

Thank you Celia, Scott, Gary, Berenice. I like readin TTB and am frequently comforted and encouraged when reading your words. They tell me there is always love and beauty out there. What worries me is that intelligence and good sense are also essential, but so lacking wherever I look. What has happened, and how to redress the balance?

Just always remember that when they push fake-news trauma at you, that it only works to traumatize further because it re-opens the earlier, actual trauma you have in your own background. It relies on your own pain. (This itself tells of the sadistic impulses of the fake-news and fake-event generators and their actor-participants-writers.)

I am glad you are working through what you are working through – all of the above. Because it’s therapeutic for the rest of us being led through it – to pick up on the good intention to “get to the bottom of it” even when it turns out there is nothing real down there. And we learn a lot in the process – about how the world works – more and more about what is going on while it is happening – about how information is pitched and human drama is crafted – about our trauma-based culture – most importantly about ourselves.

You are doing what any good journalist would do who has never surrendered their integrity. Unrelentingly asking WHY. Looking beyond the manipulation and deceit, having escaped the traps that lead there.

Blessed are they who place truth above all else. Perhaps they will be first to escape the heartbreakingly endless trauma of this planet – perhaps of this universe. Understanding seems to be the first, important step and the most promising route to healing and future healthy community.

Yes, this is a comfortable place for many of us. Because you are a real, living, breathing human being with some keen insights. As far as the news, it is important because so many horrors have been perpetrated on innocents, especially children, that, for any reasonable person, and this includes almost everyone (at least that I know), justice demands they be held to account. I can remember back to the Eisenhower administration, and I don’t remember anything like the level of corruption we see today. For the Democrats it has been the poisonous influence of the Clintons for the last two decades or more; for the Republicans perhaps mainly cupidity. But to get entirely away from it is essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Sleep is the great restorer, but for me, hiking in the woods is transformative, among magnificent trees, among does with their fawns, among fellow humans who love the woods, too. And the NPS rangers are wonderful people, most of them. The government does some things very well.

“Jesus, what has been done to these people? Have they never picked blueberries in the woods?”
Dear Celia, this is so syncronistic…yesterday, I was watching the ohsosweetly purple and bountiful sage flowers before my window, the wind moved gently in the rustling tree..A bird chimed in the new air.
I felt no energy for socalled news at all, its tedium, its blah, its impossibleness.
..I slumped there, part of life and loveliness. The thought passed through my mind..”How do those people even find energy for bombs, intrigue, malice, etc, with all this living wonder to gaze at?” Even if it is merely peeping from the limits of a small pot, if I relax, allow my – intrinsic, actually- attunement to sing my cells… there lies, speaking silently, a greater reality, burgeoning. Don’t let me neglect it, in favour of ‘news’.